1. Technical Field
This invention relates to the field of collecting useful data for billing telecommunications service subscribers and, more particularly, to a system and method for administering multiple tiers or levels of services to subscribers demanding greater flexibility in bandwidth or bit rate of services provided them, particularly digital data services.
2. Description of the Related Arts
A problem we examined is the problem of providing multiple tiers or levels of service in a new combined telecommunications/cable television environment. The problem is introduced in parent U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/627,062 entitled "Cable Data Network Architecture" of Francis R. Koperda filed Apr. 3, 1996 and a solution described but not claimed in that application. Now, subscribers to telephone services or cable services are faced with a number of alternative choices of service. They can purchase movies on demand or download them for later viewing at their leisure, listen to digital audio programming, play games locally or interactively, protect their home via burglar or fire alarm services, purchase products and services through home shopping, bank from their homes, attend school from their homes, work from their homes, subscribe to energy management with their gas, electric or other utility company, video or audio conference with other subscribers to their network or a connecting network, access new game or utility software, access web sites on the Internet to download information, data or applications software and the like in addition to subscribing to basic telephone and cable, basic or pay, services. The digital data service world is virtually unlimited.
It was previously known in the cable television arts for a subscriber to pick, for example, a tier or level of service, that represented that subscriber's interests from one of several categories based on their interest level, premium service level or the like or combinations of these factors. For example, a cable television service subscriber may subscribe to a sports tier comprising the several premium sports television channels, a movie tier comprising several of the premium movie channels and also receive a basic service level. The subscriber also subscribed to adjunct services separately such as telecommunications, energy management, digital audio or game services. These adjunct services are billed in different manners depending on the service, for example, a game service based on play time or billing by the game or a telecommunications call based on whether the call is local or long distance.
The challenge we faced is to represent a service tier or perfomance tier looking at the types of services that are presently available or available in the near future in combination over the same facilities such as Internet, telecommunications, video conferencing and the like services. We postulated that the service provider determine a maximum amount of bandwidth or bit rate and guarantee service delivery at the level of service by measuring various parameters. Some of the parameters we considered included access time, delivery duration, program length or size, maximum error rate, peak bit rate or bandwidth, connect time, data route delay, jitter, etc.
For example, when subscribing to a digital program delivery service, a subscriber may expect or even demand, that a three megabyte digital data program be downloaded to them within x seconds for play, transfer to an audio or video recorder or transfer to a personal computer or game player. In a video conference with other subscribers, the participating subscribers may demand a quality of resolution in the picture signal, color, refresh rate and quality of sound that can be best represented in terms of the serving signal's bandwidth.
In the field of digital data services, the service provider providing services in a cable environment may be constrained by the developer of the digital data service and by the subscriber to the digital data service. For example, in a digital game delivery service where two players of the same game are remotely located and play through a cable network, the service provider may be constrained by the developer of the game as to game size and speed of play and the requirements, capabilities and capacities of each player's game-playing apparatus. In particular, the boundaries that the service provider sets can influence and determine the players' quality of interactive play. Of particular importance, again, is the bandwidth of the channel upstream and downstream to each player, the bit error rate or data lost in transmission and the round-trip delay between players among other constraints. The service provider may not be able to improve the efficiency of the use of a delivered or accessed game program because 1) the features and size of the program are determined by the game program provider and 2) if the program is downloaded, the quality of play may be limited by the subscriber owned equipment that the subscriber plays or uses the program on.
Yet, the game player subscribers can criticize the cable network owner for 1) delivering the program to them with errors 2) delivering the program after an expected delivery time or with unexpected delay and 3) delivering the program over too long a duration (probably not enough bandwidth).
We generalized beyond specific services such as game services. Services today are becoming more and more digital in nature. Many different protocols are employed for providing such digital data services. Many, if not all, are peak bandwidth and delay or jitter dependent. These digital services can be characterized as ABR (available bit rate), CBR (continuous bit rate), UBR (uncommitted bit rate) and VBR (variable bit rate), among others. A constant bit rate transport is described in parent U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/738,668 entitled "Constant Bit Rate Transport in a Contention Based Medium Access Control" of Koperda et al. These various digital service delivery means suggest different parametric data requirements which typically proved to involve at least peak bandwidth and delay or jitter, as will be further defined herein.
If interactivity is required for providing a digital or analog service, connect time can tie up a network. Telecommunications carriers are now complaining that connect time to the Internet is tying up their networks. Subscribers are not able to connect to homes of Internet users who use their one line for Internet service and, yet, are unwilling to subscribe to call waiting, telephone answering or voice mail services. Meanwhile, local "free" calls tie up central office facilities including valuable trunk facilities between telephone central offices. These trunks were provisioned before the days of the Internet when the average telephone call lasted well under three minutes. (The average Internet call may involve a connect time of hours, not minutes). Thus, there remains a need in the art to provide a shared telecommunications channel between the subscriber and the location of the service provider that can periodically provide the peak bandwidth, when the subscriber requests, of dedicated or shared with others use.
Now, if we define digital data services in such terms as bandwidth, bit rate, error rate, connect time, delivery time, delay, jitter and the like, there exists in the first instance little or no known apparatus in existing networks to 1) detect the parameters comprising such a level of service, 2) relate any detected parameter levels to particular subscribers and their subscribed to level of service, 3) police or regulate the network to assure that the subscribed to level of service is met 4) provide for provisioning of future equipment to meet demand for digital data service or 5) permit flexible billing based on tier or level of service that is peak bandwidth related.
To some extent it is known to bill at different rates depending, for example, on data transfer rate. In the past, telecommunications service providers provided basic telephone service over a dedicated copper wire pair, conditioned with load coils, to guarantee dedicated bandwidth of approximately three kilohertz. To provide services beyond basic service, the telecommunications service providers have billed for private line, specially conditioned, data services (load coils are removed from the copper pair and amplifiers and equalizers added to support greater bandwidth and guarantee maximum noise levels). However, these specially conditioned lines were not shared or regulated for other lower or higher bit rate or bandwidth demanding services for provision to the same or other subscribers. The copper pair was dedicated to the subscriber, at least between their home and a serving telephone central office.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,533,108 (see FIG. 6A) describes billing for different services at different prices based on data rate. Other patents of interest include U.S. Pat. No. 5,404,505 (rate based on database size); U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,166,930; 5,050,213; 4,823,386; 4,804,248; 4,577,224; 4,536,791; 4,475,123; 4,491,983 and 4,361,851.
For the purposes of the present application then, level of service shall be defined as representing a digital data or analog service having at least a specified peak bandwidth or bit rate and a specified data route delay or jitter and optionally a bit error rate provided over a channel between the subscriber and the service provider that is shared by at least two subscribers. Variables that may be used to guarantee the subscribed-to level of service is met are delay, jitter, access time, response time, connect time, delivery rate, error rate, lost data, database or program size and the like. In addition, traditional level of service variables may be regarded as well such as parental guidance rating for particular program data which may be specific to an identified subscriber household member.
In order to provide such a concept of level of service, it is required in the art to provide a system and method of detecting service parameters, identifying the detected parameters to a particular subscriber and policing those parameters throughout the network to assure a level of service as defined above is being met.